‘Cheap’ solar and wind is a lie, green countries pay more!

Patt Morrison for May 5, 2011

Has Bjorn Lomborg—the poster child of environmental skeptics—changed his climate?

Bjorn Lomborg, Danish environmental academic, infuriated scientists around the world when he published The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001. The book claimed that overpopulation, destruction of resources, and global warming are not imminent problems. It would be a waste of time, Lomborg wrote, and even detrimental, if countries focused on environmental problems like global warming instead of on bigger problems such as worldwide poverty and disease. (...) 

The United Nations climate conference in Paris starting Nov. 30 will get under way when most minds in the French capital will still understandably be on the recent terror attacks. But for many of the 40,000 attendees, the goal is to ensure that climate change stays on the global economic agenda for the next 15 years.

The new United Nations report is being talked about as though it portends the end of the world: To avoid catastrophe, we must instantly transform the entire economy no matter the costs.

This is unjustified. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its latest major global analysis, estimated that the total impact of unmitigated climate change from extreme weather, changes in agriculture, rising sea levels and so on would be equivalent to reducing the average person’s income by between 0.2 and 2 percent in the 2070s.